Peter Cannon
- For the comic book character, see Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt.
Peter H. Cannon (b. 1951 in California) is an H. P. Lovecraft scholar and an author of Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Cannon works as an editor for Publishers Weekly, specializing in thrillers and mystery. He lives in New York City and is married with three children.
Nonfiction
Cannon first made his name as a critic in Lovecraft studies with his graduate theses written in the 1970s - A Case for Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Honors thesis, Stanford, 1973) and Lovecraft's New England (M.A. thesis, Brown University, June 1974). Lovecraft's Old Men appeared in a mailing of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in 1977; another by him, "You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive", published in Nyctalops (March 1978), studies the influences of Sherlock Holmes upon Lovecraft. Another article re: the Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft influence, "Parallel Passages in 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches' and 'The Picture in the House'" was published in Lovecraft Studies 1, No 1 (Fall 1979).
Two essays on Lovecraft appear in S.T. Joshi's critical anthology H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (1980), respectively examining the influence of Vathek and of Nathaniel Hawthorne upon Lovecraft. Cannon later published a definitive critical study on Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft (Twayne's US Authors Series No 549, 1989).
Cannon's writings on Lovecraft include the books The Chronology Out of Time: Dates in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft (both from Necronomicon Press). He edited Lovecraft Remembered (Arkham House, 1998), a collection of reminiscences by friends and acquaintances of Lovecraft, and co-edited More Annotated Lovecraft with S. T. Joshi.
He also wrote a personal memoir about another writer in the Lovecraft Circle, Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long (British Fantasy Society, 1997).
Occasional critical articles on the weird fiction genre still appear, e.g. Better Than Half a Yard I Think: Arthur Machen and Real Tennis in Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen (Autumn, 2000).
Cannon provides the Introduction to Leigh Blackmore's collection Horrors of Sherlock Holmes (R'lyeh Texts, 2017)
Fiction
His fiction includes Pulptime (W,. Paul Ganley, Publisher), in which Lovecraft, Long and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery; Scream for Jeeves: A Parody (Wodecraft Press, 1994), which retells some of Lovecraft's stories in the voice of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. An omnibus of these two titles has been issued as The Lovecraft Papers (Science Fiction Book Club, 1996).
He has also penned Lovecraft Chronicles (Subterranean Press, 2008), a novel based on Lovecraft's personal life. Later stories are collected Forever Azathoth and Other Horrors (Tartarus Press, 1999; rev. ed. Subterranean Press, 2011 (as Forever Azathoth: Pastiches and Parodies); rev. ed. Hippocampus Press, 2012 (as Forever Azathoth: Parodies and Pastiches). He has also issued The Sky Garden (a chapbook) and Episode of Pulptime and One Other (W. Paul Ganley: publisher, 2003 - two stories, one Lovecraftian, the other utilising Dracula).
He has also written several short stories in the Cthulhu Mythos genre, often with an element of parody. These include "Azathoth in Arkham" and "The Revenge of Azathoth", two sequels to "The Thing on the Doorstep"; "The Undercliffe Sentences", a takeoff on Ramsey Campbell; and "The Madness Out of Space", originally presented as a "lost" story by Lovecraft. Numerous other similar stories are collected in the two chapbooks from Tsathoggua Press - The Thing in the Bathtub and Other Lovecraftian Tales: The Early Cannon Volume One (1997) and its companion volume Tales of Lovecraftian and Humor: The Early Cannon Volume Two (1997).
See also
- List of horror fiction authors
- http://www.locusmag.com/index/s132.htm for more information on articles and fiction.
- Crypt of Cthulhu magazine No 90 (1995) includes an interview, a bibliography, and a critical article about Cannon's fiction.
- Midnight shambler magazine No 05 (1997) includes the short story "It Was the Day of the Deep One"
